Elihu Washburne

by Michael Hill

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  CONTENTS

  Foreword by David McCullough

  PROLOGUE

  1. WAR AND REVOLUTION

  2. SIEGE

  3. DESPERATION AND DESPAIR

  4. DEFEAT

  5. PEACE

  6. REIGN OF TERROR

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Photographs

  About Michael Hill

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Endnotes

  We have been through fire and blood . . . during the reign of the brigands.

  Elihu Washburne,

  June 16, 1871

  1. 75 Avenue de l’Impératrice. Location of Elihu Washburne’s home.

  2. 95 Rue de Chaillot. Location of the American Legation.

  3. Bois de Boulogne

  4. Place Vendôme. Location of the Column Vendôme toppled by the Communards on May 16, 1871.

  5. Palais des Tuileries

  6. Hôtel de Ville

  7. Buttes Montmartre

  8. Prison La Roquette. Imprisoned German nationals were held here during the siege and the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, was moved here shortly before he was executed.

  9. Prison Mazas. After his arrest, the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, was held here until moved to the Prison La Roquette. It was here that Minister Washburne visited the Archbishop during attempts to secure his release.

  10. Cemetery Père Lachaise. After his execution, Archbishop Darboy’s body was thrown in a ditch at the cemetery. It is also the site of the execution of 147 Communards on May 28, 1871.

  FOREWORD

  BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

  The medals and high commendations he so deserved were never bestowed on Elihu Washburne because he wanted it that way. An official letter from Secretary of State Hamilton Fish recognizing the sacrifices and trials Washburne had endured, and lauding his high sense of duty, was, he insisted, quite enough. He feared too much praise, Washburne said, wary of becoming too popular.

  But in his role as American Minister to France the summer of the sudden outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, in August 1870, and through the mounting horrors of the months that followed in Paris, he played a heroic part unlike that of any other American diplomat before or since. As Michael Hill writes, Elihu Washburne’s life is a great American story. And it ought to be far better known and appreciated for all it says about such laudable old attributes as courage, kindness, and patriotism.

  Raised in a family of ten children in rural Livermore, Maine, he had been “hired out” as farm help at age 14. What little education he had he acquired largely on his own. Heading west with a law degree at 24, he settled in Illinois, became a friend of Abraham Lincoln, and served eight terms in Congress, where he became an ardent voice for abolition and a strong supporter of President Lincoln, seeing him almost daily throughout the Civil War.

  At the time of his appointment to Paris by President Ulysses S. Grant, however, many in Washington considered the Congressman thoroughly unsuited for the job. He was too plain, too like a farmer, and quite obviously void of the diplomatic experience necessary for almost any post of importance, let alone Paris. So it was with much surprise that word of his accomplishments under duress was first received in Washington. That he could, in fact, prove to be one of the most effective representatives of his country ever, and a hero of the hour, would have seemed preposterous.

  With the German army rapidly advancing on Paris, and throngs of Americans desperately fleeing the city, along with most foreigners, Washburne chose to stay, not because of orders from Washington, but out of his own sense of duty. As long as any American remained, he felt he must, too. As it was, he would be the only minister or ambassador of a major country to stay at his post.

  For the security of his wife and children, he saw that they were safely relocated to quarters in Brussels—all but one grown son, Gratiot, who bravely stayed on at his father’s side.

  Meanwhile, at the request of both the French and German governments, Washburne had immediately assumed the responsibility of organizing a swift, mass exodus by special trains of the thousands of poor German laborers and their families then living in Paris who were seen now as enemies and who, if not summarily executed as spies, were certain to suffer terribly. They were, as he reported to Secretary of State Fish, “without work, without money, without credit, without friends, without bread. Pinched with hunger, terrified by threats of violence, with no means of leaving the country, they have come to me to save them.”

  Working harder than he ever had in his life, and with the help of others, Washburne succeeded in getting some 20,000 German men, women, and children safely out of Paris and back to Germany.

  No one “could have been better suited for the difficult task,” wrote the first Secretary of the Legation, Wickham Hoffman.

  Had he been brought up in diplomacy he would have hesitated and read up on precedents . . . It is quite as well that the head of an embassy should be a new man. He will attach much less importance to trifles, and act more fearlessly in emergencies.

  Later, after the German army had the city surrounded and under siege, Washburne saw that more than 600 destitute Germans who had been unable to escape received food and shelter within the safe confines of the American Legation. In the words of Shakespeare, the writer Washburne most liked to quote, he had great “fortitude of soul.”

  Through the whole of the siege lasting four and a half months, he worked fervently, sometimes eighteen hours a day. At one point he succeeded in arranging the release from the city by carriage caravan a total of 56 Americans, which left no more than 200 behind in Paris. Still, Washburne refused to leave.

  With the approach of winter, food and fuel grew ever more scarce. By Christmas people were surviving on horse meat, cats, dogs, sparrows, rats, anything to keep alive. In January the German bombardment began.

  When at last in March 1871, Paris was starved into surrendering, there followed, with the return of spring, a return of supplies and a stretch of comparative calm and order, as though the worst were over—until the horrific civil war known as the Commune burst upon the city, a calamity more hideous even than the siege. Paris, Washburne wrote, became “hell upon earth.”

  Again he kept to his post, doing everything in his power to alleviate suffering and to observe all that was happening in order to report back to Washington, but also in an effort to foresee what might happen next.

  He went everywhere—by carriage, on horseback, and on foot—and very often at great risk. The night the Communards set fire to the Tuileries Palace and much of Paris, he watched in horror from a top floor at the Legation, hour after hour, the whole city spread before him. The morning after, he went at once to survey the damage, going where few would have dared set foot. If he feared for his life, he is not known to have said so.

  He seemed tireless, but from his private writings we know how often he felt entirely “used up” and down at heart, barely able to keep going. At times he was ill to the point of being unable to leave the house. But then the next day, out the door he went back to work.

  At only one effort did he fail. In early April of 1871, after the Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Georges Darboy, was arrested and imprisoned by the Communards, the Nuncio of the Catholic Church appealed to Washburne to intervene, and Washburne, f
earing for the Archbishop’s life, moved immediately “to do everything in my power.” But his efforts were to no avail. On May 24, the Archbishop was executed.

  Washburne took the news very hard. He had gone three times to see the Archbishop in prison and had grown extremely fond of him. Like Washburne, he, too, had refused to leave Paris because he felt it his duty to stay with his people through their time of trial.

  Others knew that Washburne, an American Protestant, had tried harder than anyone to save the Archbishop, that he was incapable of standing by in the face of difficulties, and that tens of thousands were forever indebted to him for so much he had done.

  But there was a further side to his contributions and one of great benefit to history, the full extent of which has only recently come to light, and it is this that makes the publication of this book such an exceptional event.

  Beginning the summer of 1870, Elihu Washburne had been keeping a diary, his own amazing eyewitness Paris chronicle set down day by day, no matter how much else weighed on his mind, no matter how exhausted or down in spirit he felt. Nor were his entries mere abbreviated notes or hurried jottings. He wrote at length, the pages filled with great descriptive detail and much feeling, and all from a vantage point like that of no one else caught up in the crisis.

  In a two-volume memoir, Recollections of a Minister to France published in 1886, Washburne quoted frequently from the diary, but like others of his time, he would often edit or rewrite what he had said originally, or leave out large portions of the whole—his struggles with illness and depression, for example. It was only in 2009, one hundred and twenty-three years later, thanks to the efforts of Mike Hill, that the full extent of the original document was discovered in—of all places—the Library of Congress.

  Washburne, it turns out, had not written his daily entries in a conventional diary book but on loose sheets of stationery, and copies of these had been made by letterpress, the nineteenth-century equivalent of carbon paper. Later these copies were bound in with similar copies of his Paris correspondence, all together chronologically, in two volumes and given to the Library of Congress. For years it was assumed they were correspondence only—until Mike Hill looked more closely.

  As often said, the task of the historian is to a great degree detective work. And this is also a big part of the pleasure and pull of history. For nearly thirty years, Mike and I have worked together on research for my books, and I know no one more skilled and resourceful, or so tireless at the job, or who has such a good time at it.

  Handwritten manuscripts—letters, diaries, court records—are the biggest, richest part of so-called primary sources, and Mike can decipher old handwriting, even the most atrocious of scrawls, with uncanny ease and transcribe it with the speed of lightning.

  Living as he does not far from Washington, he draws heavily on the collections at the Library of Congress, where he has long been regarded by the staff as a valued colleague. Many of my most rewarding days have been working with Mike there at the Library as well as presidential libraries, universities, historical societies, and other archival collections across the country and abroad. For my latest book, The Greater Journey, about Americans in Paris in the nineteenth century, a story in which Washburne plays a major part, the resources of no fewer than thirty-two such institutions were consulted.

  But if the Washburne diary pages at the Library of Congress were only copies, then, we naturally wondered, where were the original pages?

  The answer, we soon discovered, was the Washburne family collection in Maine. So there came the summer day at Livermore, when for the first time we saw the real thing and much more—letters, rare old photographs, scrapbooks, paintings. A banquet feast of material! At one point our heads were spinning so that we had to go outside and sit under a tree to calm down.

  Still, the diary surpassed everything. It is a one-of-a-kind treasure the value of which grew greater with closer study. Not only is it filled with observations and details found nowhere else, it is superbly written page after page and in a strong clear hand. Rarely did Washburne ever cross out something, or revise after second thought. He seems to have known at the moment exactly what he wanted to say.

  He expressed great admiration for the French Minister of the Interior, Léon Gambetta—“full of pluck and courage”—high praise for the French officers he came in contact with, and especially high praise for the way the people of Paris were facing up to the calamity of the siege.

  Again and again appear long, vivid, almost cinematic passages leaving no doubt of how sensitive he was to the appalling human tragedy being played out. At a number of points, it is as if one is there watching with him, as when the German army makes its entrance down the Champs Élysées:

  At first the troops were met with cat calls, and all sorts of insulting cries, but as they poured in thicker and faster and forming companies, as they swept down the avenue to the strains of martial music the crowd seemed to be awed into silence, and no other sound was heard but the tramp of the soldiers and the occasional word of command . . .

  As the reader will find in the pages that follow, much of what he wrote is deeply moving—his account, for example, of the unexpected arrival of French government troops in Paris the morning of May 22, 1871, and the havoc of the day, the dead left strewn in the streets.

  As in so much that Washburne wrote, one feels his underlying sense of obligation to get it all down there and then, while still fresh in his mind, no matter how late the hour when at last he returned to his desk.

  In a time like our own, when almost no one in positions of public responsibility dares keep a diary, the fullness and candor of what he wrote, not to say the heart he put into it, are all the more remarkable and admirable.

  The final days of the Commune were the most savage of all, with such rampant slaughter committed by both sides as none present had ever seen or imagined.

  “The reign of the Commune for ten weeks, pursuing its career of murder, assassination, pillage, robbery, blasphemy, and terror, finally expired in blood and flame,” he reported at last on May 31 to Secretary of State Fish, in one of the selection of letters also included here.

  The incredible enormities of the Commune, their massacre of the Archbishop of Paris and other hostages, their countless murders of other persons who refused to join them in their fiendish work, their horrid and well organized plans for incendiarism intended to destroy the entire city, and which resulted in the destruction of so many of the great monuments of Paris are crimes that will never die . . .

  Elihu Washburne and all those caught up in what happened are long gone now, of course. How many today have any idea even of when the Franco-Prussian War or the Siege of Paris or the reign of the Commune happened? How many in our time have any idea who Elihu Washburne was? In a number of respected histories of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, his name does not even appear.

  But we need to know, if only because the Franco-Prussian War was Part One of a titanic struggle between France and Germany that was to be followed by the horrors of World War I and World War II. And Washburne, a truly remarkable American from whom there is much to be learned, was there, as real in life as any of us, voluntarily playing a major part in a way most of us would like to think we might, if called upon, but as few ever could.

  Now for the first time, we have the full story in his own words in print, skillfully supplemented with necessary background and editorial explanations provided by Mike Hill. The book is a landmark achievement.

  PROLOGUE

  On Friday, March 31, 1871, a tired, sick, and frustrated Elihu Washburne, the American Minister to France, scrawled in a diary he had been keeping for months, “There never was such a ‘hell upon earth’ as this very Paris . . . How long, oh, how long!”

  For 257 days, Washburne had lived through war, siege, and bloody revolution. Paris was in ruins, pockmarked by shell holes from massive Prussian cannons that had pounded the city night after night. During the worst days of a nearly five
-month siege, disease and starvation had ravaged the city, killing between 2,500 and 4,000 Parisians each week. The winter—one of the worst on record—had made life in Paris unbearable for the 2 million people trapped by the Prussians. To survive, people had been forced to eat rats, dogs, cats, zoo animals, sparrows, horses, and mules. Fuel shortages throughout the city caused “wood riots” in the streets as Parisians fought over dwindling supplies of wood to burn.

  The Franco-Prussian War, the cause of it all, had broken out in July of 1870. It was a war that the French Emperor Napoléon III, nephew of the great Napoléon, had attempted to avoid. But he had been drawn into it by an inflamed press and a circle of adventurous advisors outraged by Prussian diplomatic slights and the threat of an emerging German empire. For weeks, the Emperor and his badly organized, ill-equipped army struggled against the mighty Prussian forces of King Wilhelm and Prince Otto von Bismarck. The Emperor himself, worn out and ill, led the French army into battle at Sedan in September, but his forces were routed and he was taken prisoner. Defeat followed defeat as Bismarck’s troops marched steadily through France, halted finally at the gates of Paris by a formidable system of forts and defenses. A frustrated Bismarck—the “Iron Chancellor”—ordered his army to lay siege to the city, intent on starving and pounding it into submission.

  Finally, on January 27, 1871, France was beaten. A battered Paris could hold out no longer. A fragile French government, which had seized power after the capture of Napoléon III, gave in. France was humiliated and the final terms of surrender were denounced by the public and press. Insurrection and riots ensued and the government was toppled. A new revolutionary committee—known as the “Commune”—took control of Paris. At first a spirit of high expectation greeted the new regime, its followers hopeful that France’s long-festering social ills, neglected for years by the Emperor, would now be cured. Quickly, however, the ideals of the Commune were consumed by bitter and disillusioned extremists. Reminiscent of the brutal Commune de Paris formed in 1789 during the French Revolution, the Commune of 1871 was soon taken over by a collection of vicious and sadistic revolutionaries intent on destroying the government and Paris itself. After seizing power, they embarked on a reign of terror which, for nearly two months, filled the streets with blood, chaos, and carnage. During the final bloody week of May 1871 alone—the last gasp of the Commune—some 20,000 Parisians were massacred in a final savage struggle.